Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
